Much of what I do is introducing new online tools and approaches to businesses. I spend a lot of time researching the latest tools and sites, trialling web services, developing prototypes and recommending opportunities for my clients.
I like to think of myself as creative, but more often than not the real creativity happens is more to do with facilitation. That's to say, I am more creative when my clients are in the room and often, when shown new ideas and tools, it is the client themselves being creative. Maybe I should really say, I like to take the credit for being creative. I like to be in the room when creativity happens.
- This article is the result of talking with a client about how best to use Social Media to promote their particular business. The strategies are in order of complexity in terms of skills, time and effort. There are however two caveats for any of this to work...
You have to be able to provide something of real value. The phase I often use here is "be any good". Or to put it another way, if you can't be "any good", your customers will smell a rat.
You have to be willing to loosen up, be genuine and credible. Being yourself is easier and more effective than putting on a front. You have to be prepared to put the time in. You can't hire someone else to be genuine for you.
So, if you think you are any good and ready to let go of the old way of doing things, then we can begin...
#1. Invade
This is the simplest approach.
All you have to do is start using all the tools and sites available and participate. You can't do all the things listed below overnight, but you will eventually get into the habit of producing as well as consuming online media.
This stage is all about getting out of your company web-site and hanging out with your customers, going native if you like.
Your Tasks:
- Start a blog
- Find 50 great blogs and subscribe with an RSS reader
Upload some YouTube video
- Register for Last FM and listen to some music
- Find and join in with some email list discussion on Google Groups
- Twitter about what you are doing
- Bookmark sites you think are valuable with Delicious
- Upload 50 photos to Flickr
See how many friends and colleagues you can collect on Facebook and LinkedIn
What you blog about and why is the hardest question. Who would you like your audience to be? What would that audience want to read? I recommend your persona actually is yourself but you may choose to blog incognito.
You can be as creative as you like, in fact that's one of the things to learn about "Invasion"... if it doesn't work, throw it away and start again. The London Zoo team created a blog for one of the penguins. Do you have any penguins lurking in your company?
#2. Provide and Hope
The Provide and Hope method takes a "because you can" stance on technology. You will probably be aware of all the industry buzz around Web2.0 ideas such as user generated content and mashups where people take a little data from here, data from there and produce something new and wonderful.
A lot of these creations are at times fanciful or even pointless but that would be missing the point of why Provide And Hope is a good strategy. Let me give you an example. Six years ago I spent days trying to convince clients to provide an RSS feed. In general, they weren't interested because the only people that used RSS feeds were geeks like me. Creating an RSS feed, even for the most gnarly of data takes about an hour.
Then slowly, as RSS became widely adopted and used in all sorts of situations that are hugely beneficial to any company wanting to promote themselves. Companies who did provide RSS feeds back then benefited from:
- Kudos. It's still the fact that if you are online and hoping to be a credible company you have to demonstrate some level of technical skill.
- First-mover advantage. If, for example, you provided news in a given sector, your RSS feed would be the one every new RSS user subscribed to.
- Search-engine rankings. All the sites that syndicated news would use your news and pass on linky-love Google benefits.
Those 3 reasons aren't the main reason why every company should have published an RSS feed. The main reason was that by providing an RSS feed you open yourself up to being innovated on/with.
It's all about opportunities and the fact that unless you Provide there is no Hope.
Other examples of Providing and Hoping might be:
- Creating a forum for your customers.
- Starting a wiki about your upcoming product lines
- Creating a community for you and your competitors
- Create a blog widget that does something funky with your company data
- Share your log files (or other data you wouldn't normally share).
- Publish your products in XML or CSV (likewise)
- Organise a monthly get-together for you and your suppliers (supported with an Upcoming page of course)
- Throw a party
And of course, the world and his dog will tell you why all of the above won't work. That's not the point, partly becauseyou will not be the one in control of making it work. This is where the Hope part has to kick in.
You have to hope that having provided data, or a platform, or a service, or a meeting place that someone else will surprise you. Undoubtedly, the results will be patchy, some things will work, some won't and some (don't be scared) will blow up in your face, but unless you are doing something, someone else will be doing it better.
#3. Integrate
The Integration method is mainly about changing your work practices to be less company focussed and more web-based. For example, if your web site has a "How to find us" page with a map on it, is it linked to an online map tool such as Google Maps? Often the answer from this question is, "No, but we have a lovely map our designer has lovingly crafted in our corporate colours here".
The problem with the lovely map approach is that it isn't integrated with the wider web world. So if you a provide Google Map link, I can find directions from my house, I can zoom out, I can see the satellite image looking for landmarks like rivers and railway lines, I can find a restaurant or shoe shop nearby. There are so many things that Google Maps can do that the lovely map can't.
The point here is that by taking processes online all sorts of new opportunities become possible. For example...
- What if your Company People page had the photos hosted on Flickr? What would that mean?
- What if everyone in your company used Delicious rather than their browser bookmarks?
- What if you used Ning rather than your behind-the-firewall intranet?
What if your entire company used SlideShare and Edocr rather than your intranet?
- What if your intranet allowed all your customers in? What would have to change and why?
- What if you used Subversion rather than Emailing documents around?
- What if everyone blogged rather than filling out timesheets?
Now of course there are down sides to using web-based tools, sometimes they are slow, sometimes they are in-secure (but then even locked down email systems get fouled up by "reply to all" mistakes) and nobody wants to see that moment when they lost it in an internal meeting on YouTube's pick of the day, but the point here, again, is not to be looking for the negatives but instead see how by doing things a little differently how you can change things massively.
You may have forgotten how web-based email was, at the time, completely can't-be-done radical. That was back when your IT dept. gave you 10MB of space and the ability to read your email only when you were at your desk and not on Tuesdays.
What else in your company is due a kick up the pants?
#4. Augment
So by now, if your company is doing all of the above, you will be blogging, creating, participating. You will be experimenting with a collection of online tools, some will be disappointing and other will blow you away. If you are lucky, your Provide and Hope strategy will have turned up new avenues for innovation. In the course of all the above, you will have used tools like Blogger, Wordpress, MySpace and Facebook.
You may have created a shared aggregator. You will maybe have pulled a few feeds together with Yahoo Pipes. Departments may be sharing images with Flickr groups and items of interest with Delicious tags and status details with Twitter. By this time, as well as using free and low-cost online tools you will probably be tinkering/innovating with open-source tools such as Wordpress because although using online tools can be great hosting your own software typically gives you more flexibility to adapt what's there. With each of these tools, because you are a creative type of person, you will undoubtedly have made tweaks and changes that improve the experience in some way.
You may have created a Blogger theme, or a Facebook app or small piece of software (such as a WordPress plug-in or a MediaWiki extension) that does something that other people may benefit from. At this point you have the option to "give back" to the community the fruits of your efforts.
For example, if you have commissioned a designer to create the fluffiest design a blog has ever had, then sharing that design (providing it always attributes you) will only extend your brand awareness. For example, if you are a bank and you create a mortgage widget that really works (precious few do!), then every financial blog is going to want to have that part of you on their site.
So rather than thinking, "In an ideal world the functionality our site would have would be ..." think "What functionality can only we provide that everyone would want on their site!". This approach has a lot in common with the "Provide and Hope" method but needs a bit more technical and creative oomph to be really effective.
#5. Create
This can be the fun part. In a way it builds on the four previous strategies. It might involve extending an existing service with your data (a mashup), it may involve the creation or support of a community. Undoubtedly it will contain Invasion elements (going to where your customer are to share the news) and often it can only happen once lots of Provide and Hope strategies are lying around begging to be made use of.
The real news here is that creating something genuinely innovative and ground-breaking online can be easier than it looks. You already may be sitting on a potential goldmine and not realise it or you may be not quite be connecting with a huge audience who simply didn't know you were out there. Unless you are getting your hands dirty, Providing & Hoping, Integrating and Augmenting you simply won't know, the next big thing will have happened whilst you were in another meeting about your web site re-design.
Coming Next: "The Next 5 Social Media Strategies" which looks ways you can practically use the five approaches above to promote your business.